DiskWarrior for Windows partition?

[Macmenace]

On my Mac Pro I have one hard drive bay devoted to a bootcamp partition of Vista.

I recently noticed that I can no longer boot from that hard drive, and it isn't recognized on my Mac partition. I.E. it doesn't appear as one of my volumes and Disk Utility and the System Profiler say a hard drive doesn't even exist in that bay.

Luckily, I didn't really have any important data on the hard drive in question. But, I do have a few game saves that I would like to attempt to save.

Is there a cheap solution to recovering data from a "dead" bootcamp partition? Will DiskWarrior work on a bootcamp partitioned drive? I don't want to spend much money on recovering the data but I like to give it a try if at all possible.

 

[Duff-Man]

Will DiskWarrior work on a bootcamp partitioned drive?

Duff-Man says...this part I can answer - it's info found quickly and easily on Alsoft's website....oh yeah!

DiskWarrior 4 supports any locally connected Mac OS Standard (HFS) or Mac OS Extended (HFS Plus) disk including RAID volumes, journaled disks, case-sensitive disks, FileVaults, Time Machine backups and iPods.

 

[chrfr]

Disk Utility and the System Profiler say a hard drive doesn't even exist in that bay.

Sounds like a hardware failure more than an issue with the file structure on the disk.

 

[Macmenace]

Thank you for the responses! So, it looks like Diskwarrior is not the answer.

So, if it is a hardware problem with the drive do I have any options other than unplugging the drive and plugging it back in to see if that might bring it back to life?

 

[jtara]

The most common disk failure mode is bearing failure. The disk isn't even spinning.

You might get it going again with a tap.

Several years ago, this happened to a friend at work. He had important data on it that wasn't backed-up. (His source code!) So, he opened-up the drive, spun it up by hand, and got his data off successfully. Then he left it running for a couple of weeks until enough dust finally landed on it for a head crash.

The failure usually isn't so bad that the disk won't rotate at all. But the motor can't get up enough momentum to get it over the initial starting resistance.

Probably wouldn't work for so long today, given current densities. But if you're careful, might work long enough to get your data.

When you send a drive to one of the drive recovery companies, the most common means of recovery is to remove the disks from the spindle and mount them in a new drive that's been disassembled.

 

[zwodubber]

Last night i used Gparted to shrink my bootcamp install of win7 and it completely ruined my windows partition. It did not show up while holding option on boot and was not recognized in disk utility. I wanted to resize it from 100GB to 70GB as I only use windows for 3 programs I need for work.

Today I formatted and reinstalled a fresh bootcamp win7 partition

 

[Macmenace]

Thank you for the advice. I'll take it out and see if I can breath some life into it again! Then I'll be sure to buy a new drive.